The Polyvagal Standoff

I still remember the exact moment I first understood Polyvagal Theory, which was not the same moment I learned it. The year was 2010, and I was a mindfulness teacher studying Somatic Experiencing to become more trauma-informed. One of our SE instructors, Twig Wheeler, introduced our cohort to the theory by showing us a map that changed the world in 1815: the first map of the geologic strata of England and Wales.

Once scientists had identified this deepest geologic layer, Wheeler explained, they understood how it would determine soil composition, landscape features, the flora that could grow from it, and the fauna that was likely to live there. In similar fashion, he noted, Polyvagal Theory—a systems-level, pathway-specific framework of autonomic regulation—was a deep geology of the human nervous system, a cartography of the autonomic layers. To learn it was to learn the map of our deep biology—beneath language, beneath culture, as close to a universal language of the body as might exist. Understand this foundation layer, he said, and we could anticipate what was dependent upon it: our behavior, emotion, cognition, and our very perception of the world around us.

The moment it clicked for me, when I didn’t merely understand Polyvagal Theory in my head, but felt it in my core, it felt as though I’d become the map. It organized sensations, emotions, and thoughts into startling legibility. My body suddenly became a text I could read. Like a cavefish whose skin had grown clear in darkness, I became transparent to myself.

It opened up profound questions: What if our grounded sensitivity—billions of years of deep evolutionary inheritance expressed through thirty trillion cells, coherent as a cosmological murmuration—is the seat of our intelligence? What if the body isn’t just some mysterious, oblique mechanism whose purpose is to ferry our heads around, or the frightened animal to which we find ourselves strapped, but the foundational seat of our intelligence? What if the route to accessing this full intelligence passes directly through our experience of biological safety, which allows us to organize the free energy of our nervous systems in such a way that we become available to our experiences, open to trusted relationships, and connected with ourselves inwardly and interpersonally?

Polyvagal Takes Off

As you can probably tell, I’m not a disinterested observer. I run a translation research lab in autonomic physiology, and I’ve been close to seminal conversations, revelations, and moments of evolution of the theory itself. I’m also the author and art director of the Official Polyvagal Theory posters, which I created with Stephen Porges, the developer of the theory, and Deb Dana, the founding member of the Polyvagal Institute.

It’s safe to say that when Polyvagal Theory was first developed, it opened a neurological doorway to the legibility of the body. It introduced neural mechanisms to explain why safety is prerequisite to wellbeing. It showed us that our wellbeing is social in nature. The theory aligns with the deepest imperatives of our long evolutionary history, which is to say that 99 percent of human evolutionary history has taken place in small bands of hunter-gatherers, where safety and sociality constitute the bedrock of community.

From my introduction to Polyvagal Theory in 2010, I’ve watched it gain traction, first incrementally and then meteorically. I was surprised, not because I didn’t think this explosion was warranted, but because the name was difficult to say, the theory difficult to explain, and Porges—its primary ambassador to the world—was an unlikely pitchman: resolutely mild-mannered, sensible, down-to-earth, and unflinchingly academic.

After becoming enthusiastic about his work and finding his website, I was amused to see that it appeared to have been coded before modern browsers, with videos of him in what looked like an underground bunker. There was nothing slick about it, nothing polished or produced, and no branding. Nobody would’ve guessed that this theory would eventually shape the discourse of therapyland. Yet between countless research and esoteric papers, Polvyagal Theory was gradually translated into more accessible incarnations. It migrated into metaphor (the autonomic ladder) and imagery (traffic lights). Books about its clinical applications ensued. The Polyvagal Institute was founded, faculty was assembled, conferences organized. Then, Polyvagal Theory went viral—and like many things that go viral, it attracted critics.

In January 2026, Paul Grossman, the Research Director of University Hospital in Basel, along with 38 leading vagal experts, published a critique titled, “Why the Polyvagal Theory is Untenable: An International Expert Evaluation of the Polyvagal Theory and Commentary Upon Porges, SW.” Grossman’s paper landed with a dull thud in my inbox—and then with a dull thud in my brain.

Impossible to ignore due to the sheer number of expert authors, it asserted that core premises of the theory weren’t defensible based on neurophysiological or evolutionary evidence. I read the paper, digested its core arguments, reflected on its tone and nuance, but was unprepared for what came next: a media avalanche. RIP Polyvagal Theory, read the articles streaming across my newsfeed. When Trauma Therapy is a Scam. Polyvagal Theory Found Untenable by Scientific Community. And Scientists vs. The Polyvagal Industrial Complex, with this eyebrow-raising subheading: “39 world experts obliterate the Polyvagal Theory, calling it ‘an erroneous belief system’ that is untenable and may be harmful. Will therapists still go, ‘’Nah, I think it’s science’?”

Porges didn’t engage these critiques, but I did. Over the next several weeks, I communicated directly with Paul Grossman, faculty at the Polyvagal Institute, writers of many of these clickbait articles, and numerous therapists, polyvagalists, and colleagues. I left countless comments on hyperbolic social media posts. The headlines screamed Polyvagal Theory is Dead. But was it?

Setting the Stage

In Thomas Kuhn’s 1970 opus, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, he makes a fitting analogy: scientific paradigms are like the water in which we swim, their durability a direct function of their explanatory power. A paradigm holds sway until phenomena emerge that it can’t explain. If the theory can evolve to explain these phenomena, it endures. But if the explanatory gaps become too great, we enter a period of increasing chaos as the old theory dies and a novel paradigm with deeper explanatory power arises. The history of science shows this pattern of rising and falling: the geocentric theory (Earth as the center of the solar system) crests and falls, giving way to the heliocentric theory (with the sun as the center). Newtonian mechanics rises before giving way to quantum theory. Scientific progress and challenge are two sides of the same coin as we stumble towards capital-T Truths.

While I personally believe that Stephen Porges is a genius, he’s well aware that Polyvagal Theory is incomplete—and many people, myself included, have told him so (albeit less confrontationally than Paul Grossman). There are significant limitations to the scope of its explanatory power, particularly in clinical settings.

Yet what are we clinicians to make of contestations to the primary science? We can hardly be neutral—there’s too much at stake. New understandings in neuroscience refine maps and models and treatment protocols. Peer-review research is conducted. The evidence base strengthens or crumbles. We take a class, get certified in a modality, discover there’s demand for it (or not), discover we can bill for it (or not). This complication of navigating markets and institutions means we have skin in the game because a theory that informs how we practice is relevant to our very livelihood.

An emerging modality that’s in vogue is called cutting-edge, but that same modality, when challenged, gets dismissed as pseudoscience. Psychotherapy, whose purview is the psyche itself, is both an art and a science. And so when Polyvagal Theory (cutting-edge!) is challenged by leading vagal scientists (pseudoscience!), alarm bells start ringing. Is this thing I’ve been teaching my clients wrong? Has it been definitively debunked? Did we really understand it anyway? How are we to separate the truth from noise?

A Brief History of Polyvagal Theory

In the early 1990s, Stephen Porges wrote a research paper explaining the protective power of robust heart rate variability as a signal of vagal regulation in pre-term infants. If beat-to-beat variability was strong, these babies did fine. A neonatologist read the paper and sent Porges a letter praising it, but explained that he’d been taught in medical school that the vagus could kill a preterm infant through a sudden drop in heart rate (life-threatening bradycardia). Porges wondered: How could the same nerve be both a protective factor and the source of sudden life-threatening drops in heart rate? It was this paradox that catalyzed the initial development of the theory, which Porges introduced in 1994.

When I first interviewed Porges for the Global Resilience Summit in the summer of 2020, he spoke about the astonishment he felt when he initially presented on the theory at a trauma conference and received a standing ovation. He wasn’t sure why he’d received such an exuberant reaction. But the reason is clear: Polyvagal Theory provided a plausible neural explanation for the stress state that had been clinically observed for over a hundred years, but for which a coherent explanation had never been given. It posited that in much the same way that communications providers bundle cables into a common conduit so that internet and telephone lines might run through the same channel, your vagus holds two distinct neurological systems that undergird different behavioral responses. So the vagus isn’t properly a single nerve, but rather neurological infrastructure undergirding multiple systems, a channel that holds multiple paths, not a single path.

In 2011, Porges wrote The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological Foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-Regulation, essentially a collection of research papers (and quite difficult to fully grasp even with a neuroscience background). Porges, who’s authored more than 550 peer-reviewed papers, writes like a research scientist, and for many readers, it felt nearly impossible to penetrate his technical facade.

By the 2010s, Polyvagal Theory was starting to enter what I like to call “the translation phase”—while still ensconced in technical language, it was appearing in more mainstream conversations about somatic and mind-body therapy. It was around this time that I imagine Deb Dana, the seminal Porges Whisperer, must have felt what I felt—that this theory had extraordinary implications for therapy. In 2018, Dana published The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy, in which she introduced the Polyvagal Ladder, taking the hierarchy of autonomic states Porges had described and structuring it as a ladder with a top and bottom. She brought a storyteller’s ear and a clinician’s eye to the theory, and in her subsequent collaborations with Porges, the theory moved rapidly into the treatment room. In 2020, the Polyvagal Institute was chartered as the organization tasked with disseminating the theory.

But while Polyvagal Theory gained momentum, something else was happening. A Swiss mindfulness researcher by the name of Paul Grossman had taken issue with Porges’s ideas. In 2018, a battle slowly unfolded on Wikipedia, where Grossman edited the Polyvagal Theory page and algorithmic censors labeled the theory pseudoscience and began reverting the page anytime someone corrected it. (The edit history of Wikipedia is open source. Grossman told me directly that my assertion was absurd, but his name is in the public edit history.) While the theory continued to attract attention from therapists, this countercurrent on Wikipedia grew. In 2024, I spoke with Randall Redfield, the Executive Director of the Polyvagal Institute, who told me they’d pushed for corrections to the page to no avail. Meanwhile, Grossman had emerged as the chief antagonist.

Then, in January 2026, Grossman published an article in Clinical Neuropsychiatry titled, “Why the Polyvagal Theory in Untenable,” recruiting 38 vagal researchers as coauthors. Porges rebutted the paper in the same issue with an extended refusal to engage on methodological grounds. After the paper’s release, I reached out to Grossman and Redfield, and met with a clinician in the UK who’d published one of the most aggressive takedowns of Polyvagal Theory. “Why can’t Porges and Grossman just sit down and talk?” she asked me. “Or debate?”

In some alternate universe where we can separate ideas from egos, this might have happened. But not in ours. For multiple reasons, neither man seems to be open to understanding the other’s arguments. Grossman is intent on dismantling Polyvagal Theory, and Porges isn’t willing to expose himself to what he feels is a personal attack that’s been brewing for 20 years. But what if we take the radical position that the Grossman critique is actually very useful to the development of the theory? That Grossman is actually doing Porges a great service?

At the heart of Grossman’s critique are several related points. First, that Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA) is “not a direct and reliable measure of central vagal outflow to the heart,” which essentially contests the manner in which Polyvagal Theory was conceptualized and validated. This objection can be addressed pretty directly without arguing about RSA (which, to his point, is confounded by numerous other factors), because there are other ways to measure autonomic activity. RSA isn’t actually the most complete autonomic signal (essentially, a portal looking into the body). The reason Porges highlighted it has less to do with its intrinsic superiority and more to do with the thrust of psychophysiology research that originated in a time when technological limitations prevented the utilization of a continuous signal; unlike other autonomic signals, the heartrate variability signal doesn’t need to be sampled continuously. Today, these limitations are gone, and if Polyvagal Theory is going to survive, you should be able to look into your body through multiple doors and windows (breath, pupillary reflex, galvanic skin response, etc.) and still get the same picture of its inward furnishings (autonomic patterns). Porges and his colleagues could straightforwardly address this first objection by attempting to validate the theory through a different autonomic diagnostic window such as breath, which provides a more complete and centrally generated signal anyway.

Second, Grossman and his coauthors assert that Polyvagal Theory has mischaracterized the neuroanatomy and functions of two major brainstem vagal nuclei, the nucleus ambiguus and the dorsal motor nucleus, and that Porges mischaracterizes the evolution of the vagus. This objection tells us much about the limitations of the field of autonomic physiology, as it’s based on best inferences, or educated guesses. The evolutionary history of the vagus nerve is 400 million years long, and we’re tilting at windmills to suggest definitive understandings across such timescales here.

Grossman goes on to say that Polyvagal Theory makes inaccurate claims about mammalian social behavior (compared to nonmammalian vertebrates), and that it misinterprets seminal physiological literature. All of these points merit further investigation, yet neither man can even agree on the framework of what is being critiqued. Porges, for his part, argues that Grossman isn’t actually critiquing the peer-review version of Polyvagal Theory from the literature, but a straw man version of the argument. Yet this is complicated by the fact that the institute Porges founded teaches a simplified version of the theory—a straw man version of a different stripe. The version of the theory that’s gone viral on TikTok is even more reductive. In essence, Polyvagal Theory, by virtue of its cultural momentum and oversimplification, has become a caricature of itself.  At root, this is a longstanding intellectual battle with valid points and tactical obfuscations on both sides. Grossman has launched a 20-year attack, and Porges has spent 20 years evading.

Moving Forward, Practically

Right now, the debate is at a standstill. Grossman and company declare the theory canceled, and Porges and his team say Grossman is critiquing a straw-man version of the theory. But in this situation, everyone loses. The theory’s reputation has been damaged as this fight plays out online, adjudicated by people with few technical or conceptual qualifications or abilities to distinguish fact from noise. We’re bludgeoning each other with clickbait. In the absence of productive dialog or debate, two of the world’s smartest scientists in the field of autonomic physiology can’t agree on basic terms and definitions, and have fallen into a dynamic of combativeness and withdrawal. Meanwhile, those of us who’ve operationalized around Polyvagal Theory, imperfect as it is, suffer—as do our clients who’ve been helped by it. So how do we responsibly move forward?

I believe we can find a remedy for these problems on two levels—the first institutional and academic and the second practical. Thankfully, heart-rate variability isn’t the only autonomic signal, or even the most nuanced one. If both sides were genuinely interested in moving forward, the solution is relatively simple: evaluate the claims of Polyvagal Theory through the lens of a different autonomic diagnostic aperture, like breath. If Polyvagal Theory claims hold up, you now have a biologically independent confirmation of these phenomena, which radically strengthens them. And if the autonomic diagnostic lens changes what is seen? Then Polyvagal Theory changes. I’m confident in this outcome, because I’ve already replicated it in my lab. Our development of autonomics, which expands upon, refines, and contradicts aspects of Polyvagal Theory was validated using just such a respiratory autonomic diagnostic methodology.

On the practical level, if you’re a clinician who’s been using Polyvagal Theory successfully, you’re deeply versed in the neuroscience, and you believe the Grossman claim has no merit and can explain why to your clients in plain language, then change nothing. Stay the course so long as you’re prepared to explain why you’re doing so and it conforms to your clinical observations. Otherwise, you can make several changes to the way you practice without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

First, I’d recommend therapists be careful about teaching the Polyvagal ladder. Although there are valid reasons for teaching it, I believe it dramatically oversimplifies the nuanced interaction of three different neurological systems and three different neurochemical systems into a flat, one-dimensional hierarchy. It’s much more accurately conceptualized as a spiral or circle than a linear hierarchy. The implicit assumption of the ladder is that social (ventral vagal) and shutdown (dorsal vagal) don’t directly touch. This is false.

Second, instead of using Polyvagal terminology—ventral vagal, dorsal vagal, etc.—use words that describe the actions of systems, not their source nuclei in the brainstem. Talk about a connection system instead of a ventral vagal system. Talk about a shutdown system instead of a dorsal vagal system. That way, if it turns out the neurology isn’t exactly correct, nobody can say you’re using incorrect nomenclature or teaching an outdated neurophysiological model.

Third, focus on describing what people do, feel, and experience, rather than the terminology or brain structures involved. Talk about the felt texture of becoming available to relationship—the way safety and connection open the chest, deepen the breath, invite us into tracking micro-expressions and vocal prosody. How our experience changes, rather than discussing the ventral vagal system. Talk about how you withdraw when you move into shutdown, the way that the core loses tone, the way numbness sets in, and the way the spine collapses, rather than talking about a dorsal vagal response mediated by the dorsal motor nucleus of the brainstem. Don’t reduce lived experience to measurements or neural signals. The experience itself matters.

Just as importantly, don’t forget what’s not being contested here. Whatever happens in this debate, whatever the neural mechanisms turn out to be, some of the most important elements of the theory aren’t being contested. It’s thanks to Polyvagal Theory that we understand that the autonomic nervous system is composed of three primary systems, not two, a framing that allows us to attach descriptive language to stress states that don’t involve activation, muscle tension, and adrenaline. This system shapes how organisms detect, evaluate, and respond to cues of safety, danger, and lifethreat, and the capacity to describe and interface directly with the physiological layer of experience opens therapeutic opportunities such that we can work directly with the living nervous system. Polyvagal Theory has greatly refined this interventional terrain.

Furthermore, the lens of Polyvagal Theory has helped affirm that wellbeing is social in nature and that embodied safety is a precondition for wellbeing. It’s helped restore the primacy of embodied experience (versus cognition), orienting us toward what we feel and toward the present moment. None of this is being contested by Grossman.

You don’t have to know neuroscience to see and feel these things, because they’re fundamental to your direct, felt experience of healthy relationship. You can simply feel the way they’re life-giving. You can know them in your core just as you know the sensation of the morning sun on your face, the peace you feel hearing the chorus of birds, or the delight you feel after the toddler at the bakery, after receiving your smile, offers you half of the strawberry scone he’s eating. You can know them directly because you’ve been blessed with a human body, graced with the gift of being alive. Because, to paraphrase Dr. Porges, “You feel yourself, and therefore you are.”